Category Archives: Critical Living

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My guest on this program is Eric Patashnik, Julis-Rabinowitz Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Brown University. He is one of three co-authors of Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine, to be published next Wednesday, October 4th. The authors argue that many common medical treatments in the U.S. are not based on sound science, and shed light on why the government’s response to that troubling situation has been so inadequate, and why efforts to improve the evidence base of U.S. medicine continue to cause so much political controversy and public trepidation.

My guest on this program is Lisa Tessman, professor of philosophy at Binghampton University. She teaches and does research in ethics, moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and related areas. Her work focuses on understanding how real human beings construct morality and experience moral demands, especially under difficult conditions. She is the author of Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality, and most recently When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible, in which she provides examples, both real and fictional, of situations that will make us wonder whether we can be required to do the impossible, and how and why human beings have constructed moral requirements to be binding even when they are impossible to fulfill.

Dan Everett’s definition of culture:
“Culture is the abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. Culture is found only in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members. Culture permeates the individual, the community, behaviors, and thinking” (66).

My guest on this program is Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, and was recently named the 2017 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Her most recent book is Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, in which she analyzes the roots of both anger, finding it conceptually confused and normatively pernicious, and forgiveness, as potentially the best way to respond to injury, shedding new light on both.

My guest on this program is Shawn Otto, author of The War On Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It. He investigates the historical, social, philosophical, political, and emotional reasons why the evidence-based politics that gave birth to democracy are now in decline and authoritarian politics are once again on the rise on both left and right—and he provides some compelling solutions to bring us to our collective senses, before it’s too late.

My guest on this program is Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the Glass Cage, among other books. Former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, he has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Wired. His most recent book is Utopia is Creepy and Other Provocations, which gathers a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays. It offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

As a follow up to this on-air conversation, Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement the day before. Here are links to an NPR story about it, Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog post response, and the original text of Zuckerberg’s announcement:

Larry Geni (pronounced JEE-nee) is a career-long, passionate educator and founder of Geni Consulting, a firm dedicated to transforming classrooms into dynamic communities of self-directed learners. In his more than 25 years as a high school science teacher, he developed a unique approach to education that teaches students to take ownership of the learning process and creates a classroom culture grounded in the personal growth and academic success for every student. His two books on this are available for free on his website.